CEO Ballmer to Leave Company

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO, plans to retire sometime in the next 12 months, but will continue in his current role until the selection of his replacement. In the near term, the change in CEO will likely have minimal impact on Microsoft’s technology for enterprise customers and partners, but it could affect areas other than technology.

In the unexpected announcement on Aug. 23, 2013, Ballmer noted that having embarked on the transition with a strong leadership team, his original retirement plans would have meant his leaving in the midst of the transition and that the company needed a CEO “who will be here for the longer term for the new direction.” The new leadership team Ballmer refers to was announced in July 2013 and was the largest reorganization in the company under Ballmer’s term as CEO. The new direction is the “devices and services” strategy announced in the 2012 Annual Report to shareholders. The strategy calls for Microsoft to expand beyond software to build specific devices for specific purposes (such as the Surface tablet line) and support them with hosted services (such as Office 365). Ballmer’s departure is unlikely to change roadmaps for key products such as Windows and Office and services such as Office 365 and Azure. Their direction for the next several years is already set, and product teams are busy delivering products and services on a new faster cadence dictated by a rapidly evolving marketplace and the need to implement the new strategy. For many enterprise customers and partners, the biggest change will be that they are losing a long-term, personal relationship with Microsoft’s day-to-day leader who had worked with and listened to them over the years. (Ballmer has a remarkable ability to remember people regardless of how long it had been since they had last met.)